


Ghost Stories

by starlightwalking



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Ghosts, Tolkien Gen Week 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-05 00:08:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13375947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlightwalking/pseuds/starlightwalking
Summary: Asta always loved ghost stories. She never expected to become one.





	Ghost Stories

**Author's Note:**

> This fic focuses on an OC, the sister of Fíli and Kíli. I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this idea before now, but I’m really happy with how it turned out!  
> This is the first of my fics for Tolkien Gen Week, an event I'm organizing. Check out @tolkiengenweek on tumblr for more info! Day 1 and theme of this fic is "Family".

There once was a small, happy family, who loved each other very much and lived a long and peaceful life together.

Asta's family was not like that family. Before she was even born, they had been driven from their homeland and fought a war with vile orcs. And the events that followed were no less tragic.

Asta always loved ghost stories. Tales of fallen warriors, murdered bandits, forgotten kings—anything spooky and scary was a delight.

When her older brothers would frighten her, she had an easy way of revenge. Asta was a chronicler, a journal keeper, a writer with a flair for the supernatural. She would spin them creepy tales and make Fíli tremble in his boots and give Kíli nightmares.

Asta was thirty-one when she died.

She had barely come of age, and she was desperate to prove herself. She and her father were traveling with a caravan of fur traders, and she had eagerly taken the forefront of the transactions. Asta was tossing a stone back and forth in her hands on the ride home, totally at ease as she rode in the back of the party, when the orcs attacked.

Her father, Vali, was slain before her eyes; every other member of the caravan was slaughtered. Asta pushed her horse to run and run and run, but the orcs caught up to her. Young and terrified and alone, she was cornered.

It was like a story straight out of one of her horror tales. She was trapped—she fought back with her father's axe, too hefty for her to swing well—but she too was killed, the stone falling out of her limp, dead fingers.

Asta always loved ghost stories. She never expected to become one.

* * *

The first thing she heard was crying. The first thing she understood was her mother's voice, calling out for her lost family: "Asta! Vali!"

The first thing she saw was her brother, Fíli, holding their mother in his arms. (He was too young for this. They all were.)

The first thing she did was rise.

Kíli sat staring into the fireplace, his face stony, his eyes vacant. Asta's heart broke: he'd always had a soft spot for her, looking out for her and protecting her the way Fíli did for him. Now he was robbed of a sister, no longer an older brother.

Asta drifted over to Kíli, yearning to comfort him.  _I'm here, Kí,_  she tried to say. She couldn't even hear her own voice.

Kíli shivered. A tear dripped down his face. "Ma," he croaked. "Asta...she's..."

_I'm here! I'm here!_  Asta cried, voiceless.  _Kíli! Fíli! Ma! I'm here!_

There once was a dwarf who died in her old age, passing peacefully in her sleep. She returned as a ghost, dining and conversing with a family who didn't even realize she had died until they discovered her skeleton in her closet.

Asta was not like the old woman she had conjured in her first ghost story. She could not speak, touch, or give any sign of her presence other than a faint, breath-like feeling on the back of the neck.

"She's gone," Fíli said. "Da, too." He opened his palm, offering something to Dís. "She...the search party found this, with Da's axe."

Dís took it from him. It was the rock, the smooth stone she'd carried with her into death. Dís stared at it, then clenched her fist over it.

"Boys," she said. Dís wiped her eyes, then opened her arms, beckoning her sons forward. "Boys, come here."

They came; they embraced, holding on to the family the family they retained. Asta tried to join, but she was insubstantial. A ghost.

* * *

There once was a girl, alone on the road, with nowhere to hide when the ghosts came for her soul. She screamed, but no one came, and she joined their ranks before the sun rose.

Asta was not like that girl whose story had once kept Kíli awake for weeks. She had no ghostly companions, and many living ones.

She did not know where her father's spirit had gone, or why he had not joined her in haunting their family. Like the other merchants on the caravan, Vali was simply...gone, while Asta remained.

She watched. That was all she could do—watch, and pray to a Maker who wasn't listening.

* * *

"Jump!" Fíli hollered. The brothers stood on either side of a rising river. Only minutes before, they had been adventuring in bright daylight; now a storm rolled in, turning their adventure dangerous.

Kíli squatted, preparing to leap. Asta watched them. This was the kind of game that would have exhilarated her, had she been alive to join. Instead, she gazed on, hovering uselessly over the turbulent waters below.

Once there was a clumsy elf who fell and broke his neck on a stepping stone one sunny day. He haunted the river, dragging anyone else who tried to cross into the water.

Asta was not like the elf she had once envisioned while on a camping trip. She had not died here, and she would never harm her brothers.

Kíli jumped.

Fíli was the eldest, the protector who caught Asta when she fell and scraped her knees. But Fíli was too far to catch Kíli as he missed his mark and plummeted into the raging waters below—

Asta screamed noiselessly, pushing Kíli with insubstantial arms. He flew upward and tumbled onto the shore.

As he lay gasping on the bank, Kíli shouted, "Oh!" He felt around in the mud until he found a small, smooth rock. "Thank Mahal, I didn't lose it. Asta's stone."

"Ma would'a killed you if you had." Fíli dragged him away from the river, his reprimand devolving into hysterical laughter as the rain soaked them both.

"But I already almost died!" Kíli shouted as they stumbled back home. "Fí! Didn't you see?"

"I wouldn't let you," Fíli said, shoving him. "And Ma wouldn't either, not really."

Asta smiled as she followed them. No—nor would she.

* * *

Dís slammed the door in her brother's face, shaking. Thorin II, bearing the mighty name of Oakenshield and a unshakable thirst for revenge, wanted to take Fíli and Kíli— _her_  sons— _Asta's_  brothers—on a quest to slay a dragon. For what? Gold? Honor? A home Dís could barely remember?

Dís sat down heavily at her dining table. She broke down, sobbing. "I won't lose them, too," she shouted to the sky. "Not after Father and Frerin and Vali and—and Asta..."

Asta tried to lay a hand on her mother's shoulder. It passed right through, but Dís shivered, feeling—something.

There was once a father who sent his sons away to war in his stead. They died, and returned to haunt his reflection until he tore his own eyes out in mad guilt.

Asta did not resemble such a violent spirit, the name of which she had never quite settled on in all her writings. She loved her mother and her brothers both, and wished nothing for them but peace and happiness.

Fíli and Kíli desperately wanted to go along with Thorin. She'd heard them talking about it in hushed voices when they thought no one could hear—and no one could, no one but Asta.

_Ma, let them choose,_  she murmured to unhearing ears.  _They are old enough, and they will live. I'll see to it._

"Kíli's so reckless," Dís muttered, almost if she could hear. "Not even Fíli can stop him..."

_But I can,_  Asta promised.

"Oh, Vali." Dís sighed. "What would you do?"

Vali wasn't here, but Asta was. She touched Dís's pocket softly, and her mother's fingers closed around the stone.

_Make him promise,_  she urged.

Dís frowned, and she reached for a chisel.

* * *

Some heroes win mighty battles. Some slay dragons. Some steal precious stones, and hearts along with them. Some fall in love with gorgeous elves, and beat the odds. Some survive and tell the tale to their grandchildren.

Others don't.

Asta wrote one tale that ended happily. The ghost is reborn, the family joyously reunited.

This tale is nothing like it.

Asta watched over her brothers, even when Fíli jumped into barrels and Kíli risked everything for an elf he just met. But she was only a ghost, and she could not do everything. She had no more life to give.

Dís was in Ered Luin for the funerals. That's what broke Asta the most. Her body and Vali's had been unsightly and marred, but Dís had been there to see them lowered into the earth.

Fíli and Kíli—they passed on. They were with Frerin, and Thorin, and Vali, and all the other souls that had fallen in defense of Erebor and its people.

Asta remained.

She never expected to be here, never thought she would be the sole watcher of a tragic family history. Years alone, unable to communicate, had sorrowed and sombered her already serious spirit, but now she was beyond broken.

Dís wasn't there, but that  _stupid_  elf was. It infuriated her, that the outsider Kíli had foolishly given his life for could watch his body be set into stone in the halls of his fathers, and his own mother could not.

But there was something else about the elf. Asta had been there, cursing and sobbing as her brother died, and the elf—she had  _heard_.

Asta remained by the tombs long after everyone else was gone. She would stay there until Dís arrived—perhaps even until Dís died and left her completely, utterly alone.

But the elf returned. She stared at Asta for a long time, before bowing to her.

"My lady dwarf," she said reverently. "I am Tauriel. And you—you are Kíli's sister, are you not?"

Gruffly, Asta inclined her head.

Tauriel opened her palm. In it was the stone, engraved with Dís's prayer:  _Return to me._

Asta had no heart, but if she had, it would have stopped beating.

_My stone!_  she cried.

Tauriel flinched. "Yours?"

_You can...hear me?_  Asta's spirit trembled, overcome with wonder and grief.

"Others cannot?" Tauriel blinked. "I am sorry. How long...?"

_Forty-two years._  Long and hard they were, with no one to speak to and no one knowing she was there.

Asta shook, staring at the stone. It had been with her when she died, tumbling out of her limp hands as the orc struck its final blow. It had followed her as her family assigned a deeper meaning to it than she had ever intended when she picked it up on the side of the road that fateful morning, but never once had she touched it in all her undeath.

If it was returned to her...

"You ought to have this," Tauriel said, offering her the stone. She wiped away a tear from her eye. Asta was jealous: without a body, she hadn't cried in all those forty-two years.

_I..._  Now that she could, Asta didn't know what to say.  _You..._

Tauriel placed the stone reverently on Kíli's tomb. She bowed again, then left, murmuring a last goodbye: "Thank you."

Asta stared at the stone. Her spectral form trembling, she outstretched an arm...

There once was a lost and lonely girl, dead too soon, who wandered the world eternally, until at last it died and she was left floating in space.

Asta didn't write that tale. She was not that girl.

She touched the stone and sighed. And if Tauriel had watched, she would have seen the faint outline of the weary ghost glow for a moment, then finally fade away.

At last, Asta found her peace.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading & commenting!


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